Tones and Half Tones

You may have wondered why, when notes on the music staff were placed adjacent to the tablature, they sometimes indicated a distance of one fret and sometimes two. To understand this we have to learn about tones and half tones. This is easy on the guitar, since from one fret to the next is a half tone (also called half step or semitone). A distance of two frets (i.e., from the first fret to the third) is a whole tone.

In music notation, the tones and half tones are a little harder to spot due to the way the notes are identified. Conventionally, the letters A through G are used, like this:

Here are those same notes in tablature.

You can see from the first three notes that E to F is only a half tone (one fret) whereas F to G is a whole tone (two frets). See if you can find the other half tone relationships.